


Have a weekday off (gonna leave for California anyway)

by thedorkygirl



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alcohol, Drugs, Ice, Marijuana, Tweaking, meth, not explicit drug use (just mentioned), pot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 10:16:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20208100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedorkygirl/pseuds/thedorkygirl
Summary: small town kids looking for something to do all night long. 2006.





	Have a weekday off (gonna leave for California anyway)

On Good Friday, you try to be bad.

Jimmy Matson's been icing it since nine that morning. This you know because your younger sister Trina sat in the room and watched while he smoked; she left him and came back with you three hours later to find him yelling at Eli for sooting up his happy-face pipe. You aren't sure what he's talking about until he shows you all -- somebody's taken a lighter to his thick plastic bowl pipe and melted eyes above the gaping Munchian mouth.

"I gotta show you how to smoke it right," he tells Eli. "'Cause I never get it black like that. It took me three hours to get it clean. Look at all these toothpicks on Jason's floor." 

"Yeah," Jason agrees. 

Jimmy Matson's been living with Jason for close on three weeks, and his parents have called the police on him for being a runaway. He's planning on leaving for California next week, but if the cops come, he's already there. The plan is for him to jet out the back and go through the woods that line the edge of Jason's property if the popo show up. Nobody seems to worry that they'll be here, so you listen only halfheartedly as Jimmy Matson talks about failing his runaway drug test if he gets caught. 

He'd fail a once-over, really, if anybody took time to look at him. His wrists are smaller than yours for all that he's five inches taller than you, and Trina told you that Lauren Cox (whose house you told your granny you were at tonight) could touch her fingers around his upper thigh. It isn't your business, though, because you don't really care for Jimmy Matson. You're here to get drunk tonight with your sister and friends, not smoke with him and Eli. 

"I'll do it better next time, promise," says Eli." 

You think queasily of the fact that he drove you, Trina, and your best friend Denise over in his truck. You thought he was on pot, but now you're wondering if that one close call was closer than any other time that Eli's driven you while high. You're suddenly very glad that you'd decided not to chance it in the bed of his F-150. You just know that the only time you get in there when Eli, a bad driver at best, isn't completely sober will be when he's just done a line or smoked ice or _ something _ equally stupid. He told you yesterday that being on ice was like being a million times smarter than he'd been, and you'd held your tongue, because Eli isn't exactly your friend anyway. 

Eli's dressed nice for him -- his pants are mostly up over his boxers and his belt doesn't have the world "bitch" on the buckle, so he's phasing out of his wigger look. He's sitting in the corner wringing his fingers together and looking at the huge mural on the concrete floor of Jason's room that Jason did himself (he's going to be an artist, he says, and go to art school in South Carolina or maybe California). 

Before long, Eli and Jimmy Matson leave in Eli's truck for another party. It's five-thirty, and they promise to be home before eleven with liquor. 

You pull a cheap TV dinner out of your backpack, because you were starving before you left and not certain that Jason had any food in his house. He was evicted two months ago, but the landlord hasn't been in to enforce that, so the family has kept on, always ready to leave. There isn't that much furniture in his house, and it sort of smells because of the puppy that nobody's taken the time to train. It's a pitt, and you know that it'll be put down to sleep for killing another dog, just like Jason's last pitt. He's trash, but it's okay, because you're trash too, and he's got aspirations for better than what he is. 

Trina's dating Jason, and she's got charisma and charm and makes people want to be her friend no matter how badly she treats them. Every boy you see tonight has been in love with her at some point. This is what makes it so that she can sit on her ass and talk while you, Jason, and Kevin work on setting up the tent in the backyard after you finish your sirloin steak, peas, and potatoes. 

It's your tent -- the one that you and your family go camping in every summer -- and so that means that you're the one who's most experience in setting it up. Jason looks at you like you're crazy when you tell him _ no, no, no, too small _ , as he points out spots for the tent. It's almost six, and the clouds over you all's heads are an ash blue that doesn't bode well for the marshmallows you all plan on roasting tonight. The three of you have unfolded the tent -- which is two rooms and much larger than the boys had thought that it would be -- and Jason and Kevin are working on getting stakes from the yard, because you and Trina forgot the bag of them at home. 

Sitting on old seats taken out of what looks like a rusted Volkswagen, Denise and Trina surround the bonfire pit that Kevin dug out last summer, watching you struggle with the tent poles that you volunteered to assemble if only for the fact that you're the only person who knows how to put together the tent at all. You'd be irritated at the fact that they're watching instead of helping, even after you repeatedly asked, but that would only make them snicker at you and mock you for your tetchiness. Trina's your sister and Denise your best friend, but Denise also likes Trina's way of thumbing authority -- and is Jason and Kevin's sister -- so she can do what she wants. 

Denise isn't really their sister, because she and Jason have different mamas, and Jason and Kevin have different daddies, but Kevin's dad is Denise's little sister's Ariana's father, too, so it doesn't matter. Besides, you and Trina don't have the same daddy either. It's not like you're snobs about the whole deal. You do think it's funny that Denise and Jason and Trina have dark brown hair while Ariana and Kevin and you are blondes. 

It takes you and Kevin and Jason almost twenty minutes to get the tent up, but it only takes so long because Kevin is twelve, after all, and keeps shifting the frame in the wrong direction because he's never assembled a tent before and has no spatial aptitude. It's a beautiful tent with a porch and nylon windows that have sturdy curtains that one can zip up if it gets cold. 

"Kevin," Jason says, "go get that vodka that Trina and Trista brought over and gulp it." 

"Oh, no," you say. "Drink it with orange juice, Kevin. Do you have any orange juice? He doesn't want to drink it all once." 

Jason just grins at you like you're a dumbass, something that you're used to because you really don't understand how he treats his little brother and sister sometimes. It's because you're not the same sort of white trash that Jason is, and he has this way of making you feel stupid for not being as poor and street ready. 

"He can handle it." 

"I thought he'd never been drunk before," you venture. 

"He has alcoholism in his _ veins _ ," he says, which is true. Every parent all y'all can name is an addict, from alcohol to pot to meth. It's their level of wrongness that separates you. You all bleed addiction in the way that blurs those lines, even Denise, who won't touch an illegal drug but came to school drunk every day. "He can handle it." 

So Kevin goes and drinks an inch or two of straight vodka alone in his house that smells like dog shit, and then comes out with a whoop, saying that he's ready for his job as fire-tender. Jason doesn't even pause, just hands him some matches and tells him to clear the pit before he lights. 

You and Kevin spend the next ten minutes taking old clothes out of the hole (they burn black and make the smoke choke one, you both agree). There are all sorts of interesting things under the old doors and too-small t-shirts: sneakers and teddy bears and beer bottles and, surprisingly, an entire collection of now-warped and molded Cosmopolitans. These things you remove, throwing somewhere to the right, away from the tent and away from the bonfire. 

You have to have it small, otherwise it will be seen from the road, and the police will be called. It takes almost another ten minutes lifting huge old bathroom doors out of the pit and onto the grass next to it. There are rusty nails everywhere, and you're afraid of sticking yourself, but you clear it all anyway, because nobody else seems to care, and you're paranoid as all hell right now, as always. 

Finally, Jason deems the hole cleared enough. There are still old magazines littered throughout the pit, and you wonder if they will color the flames with their ink. Scraps of lumber are pulled forward to the edge. Kevin pours paint on the boards before striking a match. You'd complain, but Jason's watching him, and if his own brother can't be trusted to keep an eye on him, then who is? Besides, you'll get labeled a worrywart, and you've promised yourself that you're not to be annoying and afraid of getting busted this night. 

The flames seem to sparkle, old primed doors popping their cardboard shells before they truly catch. There's no heat yet, the fire's too new, but everyone gathers round and rubs their hands together in front of the flames like a group of old timey hobos. You are all determined to have a wonderful time. 

Jason and Kevin's little sister comes with their mom. Denise has never met Jason and Kevin's younger sister before -- the baby has a different daddy too -- but she _ loves _ her. The little girl is the same age as Denise's step-brother, and if there is one thing that Denise is good at, it is children. Her name is Darling, and yes, that is her true name. 

"Darling looks like a Cabbage Patch Kid!" Denise squeals, gathering the little girl to her and squeezing her into a hug. "She's so _ cute _ , Jason." 

"She's a fatass," Jason and Kevin say almost in unison. 

"Shut _ up _ ," Darling says, and Denise loves it. 

"She's so cute!" 

You try not to make eye-contact with Jason's mom, because the last time that you spent the night at Jason's house, she ended up kicking everybody (including her own sons) out. You all were mad at Jason's crankster mom, so you all stole a bottle of wine from her and the four of you -- you, Trina, Denise, and Jason – drank it in her backyard while waiting a ride to your and Trina's house. You're not certain if Jason's cousin (out on parole that very day; twenty years old) took the blame like she'd promised. 

In the next hour, Darling's eaten an entire bag of pixie sticks by herself, and you wonder if the five-year-old is going to be getting _ any _ sleep tonight. You steal her from Denise and pull her onto your lap, feeling her heavy weight as a sort of tiny miracle, because you haven't been around a five-year-old since Trina was five, and they smell pretty and babyish. 

It starts to rain a little at nine o'clock, and you and Denise sit somberly by the fire that's too high for being in a backyard and contemplate your collective sobriety. Eli and Jimmy Matson aren't due back for another two or three hours, and you aren't sure that you can last that long. 

"I'm sober, I'm sober, I'm sober," you moan to Denise. "I can't believe how sober I am." 

"I've never sat around a campfire without a beer in my hand," she admits. 

You've never sat around a campfire with beer, so you don't say anything to make you appear less worldly. She's younger by a year. 

At nine-forty-five Eli and Jimmy Matson come home without liquor. You're lying in the tent with Denise, Jason, and Trina, scrunched on a mattress that you won't let your sister and her boyfriend take for themselves while Denise gets the second mattress wholly for herself. When you hear Eli squeal onto the gravel of the driveway, you get happy. When they tell you that they couldn't get any booze, you turn your back to them and try to sleep. 

Some time later, there is a commotion outside the tent door, and the flap is unzipped. 

"Big Jason's looking for you," Jimmy Matson and Eli tell you all, but you're too tired to listen to them and care. 

Jason mumbles something out of sleep and apathy. 

"Why?" you ask out of habit. 

"I don't know." 

Trina starts screeching at them to get the fuck out of the tent, because it's midnight, and she's _ tired _ , and they woke her. 

You close your eyes, listening to the drip of the rain on the tent, and fall asleep this time. In what feels like only moments later, your eyes are open and you're lying on the ground with your side pressed against the tent. Where you have made contact, water has seeped through, and you are wet. Nobody else is in the tent; they've left you alone. 

The rain has turned into a downpour, and you're not sure what time it is other than day - the sky is gray, not black. You stumble drowsily out of the tent and up the back porch into the house, wandering the short hall until you reach the living room, where you find the others watching Jason set up the Playstation. 

Looking around, you decided that the living room used to be the garage in a previous life. The wall facing the drive has a huge bay window exactly the size for a one-car garage door, and the circuit box is on the back wall. The carpet is different from that which is covering the rest of the house, and you realize that there is _ only _ the big bay window in this room: the other walls are blank. 

"Eli, why'd you let us sleep outside?" Trina asks, staring at the television as it flickered between channels while Jason searched for the right one. "That was the stupidest thing we've done in a while." 

Eli is pacing, anxious, coming down. 

"I told y'all to come inside with us. I told y'all it was cold." 

"Yes, but it was _ wet _ ." 

She'd come back to the tent in the middle of the storm to sleep on her own accord, so you tune her out while Jason fiddles with getting Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas started 

"La policia?" Jimmy Matson asks, but nobody pays attention to him. Denise says he's been tweaking like this starting at midnight when he fell asleep and dreamed that the cops were outside the window. It's the lightning on the lawn that scares him. He's so maddening that you wonder if you'd rather had been inside the warm and dry house _ with _ him or out in the chilly, damp temp _ without _ him. 

Nobody but Trina is having fun watching Jason and Kevin play GTA, though she might be faking it. You pick at your thumb where the skin is always soft and sigh. You don't have a book with you, there's no weed, there's no alcohol, you're _ bored. _ The clock on the wall says it's 7am, and then 7:30, and then 7:37, and it feels like 8 o'clock will never come. You want to go home, but you don't want to say anything before Trina or Denise say something. 

"My mom calls you Bug Eyes," Jason says. 

"What?" Jimmy Matson says. 

"My mom, she said, are Eli and Bug Eyes here?" Jason tells him. "She asked me what you were tripping on, because you've been up all night. She told me that you were fucking bipolar: kept going to the window and pushing the blinds away and asking if it was the cops." 

Thunder clashes outside, and Jimmy Matson hisses: "La policia?" 

Finally, your sister complains to Jason about just sitting there, watching him steal cars and punch cops on the TV. She must have gotten tired of pretending to be entertained. You couldn't have said anything any sooner; everyone here is cooler than you are. Trina gets away with it. 

"Fine, fine," he says. "Have you guys ever seen White Castle?" 

Nobody has; he gets a grin on his face, the sort of grin you recognize from yourself when it comes time to share a great movie with friends. This is the sort of grin you're comfortable with, and you stop picking at your thumb as he begins shutting down GTA and looking for the DVD. 

Jason sits down on the couch next to Trina, leaving barely enough room for you to sit, so you scoot down on the floor and rest your back against the couch. Denise had been sitting in a chair that was at an old angle to the television, but now she moves to the more prime seating on the couch where you just vacated. 

"Move over," she says, "I can't see the TV." 

Jason leans loser into Trina, and you sigh and get up off the floor, headed to the chair. At least it's not the floor. 

The movie is funny, and even Eli settles down from his endless pacing to watch it. Only Jimmy Matson remains active, going back and forth to the windows every time there's a flash of lightning. This is good - there's no weed, and you're starting to get hungry, but at least there's something to do. You wonder if you can go home after the movie, and if you'll be able to ask Eli without looking like a crybaby. 

"La policia?" Jimmy Matson pulls down the blinds, but everybody's so into laughing at Harold & Kumar to bother telling him to sit the heck down. 

"Hey, Jimmy, don't worry if there really is a cop out there," Jason tells him. "The cops are always in the church parking lot. They think we're running a meth lab here. Like you couldn't smell it if we were." 

"Yeah," says Denise, "my mom almost didn't let me come because she heard that y'all are always getting raided, and she thought that we'd get caught." 

"Three times!" Jason says. "We've been raided three times. That's not a lot." 

" _ We've _ never been raided," Denise says primly. Your granny has never been raided either, and wouldn't have any reason to be raided besides which, but you don't mention it. 

Kevin farts, and everybody around him instinctively leans back and away. You've been trapped in a car with him before, and it isn't how you want to die. 

Jimmy Matson looks around. "La policia?" 

Jason's mom suddenly starts screaming from her bedroom, and everyone cringes. 

"What's she want?" asks Kevin. 

"I'll go check," says Jason, and he gets up and heads down the hall. There's some yelling and cussing in the background as everyone continues watching the movie, and then Jason's back. "Eli what the fuck did you do?" 

Eli throws his hands up into the air. "What did I do?"   
  


"My mom's missing her stash!" Jason says. "Fuck. _ Fuck _ ." 

"Eli stole meth from your mom?" you ask, incredulous. 

You sister rolls her eyes. "Eli steals from _ everyone _ , Trista." 

Eli looks as innocent as he can, his eyes widening like a frog that's been stepped on. "I didn't steal nothing!" he says. But it isn't long before Eli pretends to get a call and says he has to go, and he's out the door and in his truck before you can blink. 

"Is your mom mad?" you ask Jason and Kevin. 

"She's pissed but she ain't going to do nothing," Jason says. "It wasn't much." 

"Hey," says Trina. "Eli left his shoes!" She points to the door where Eli's sneakers are piled on the floor. Who would go barefoot in this house? you wonder. You're uncomfortable enough sitting on the couch. 

"Isn't it illegal to drive without your shoes?" you ask. 

"Naw," says Jason. 

"I think it is," says Denise. "My mom always keeps flipflops in the car in case she gets pulled over."   
  


"Eli's got bigger things to worry about if he gets pulled over," Jason says. "He can't pass a field sobriety test sober, and he's fucked up right now." 

"Shit," you say. "He was our ride home." 

"My mom's coming to get me after the movie," Denise says. "She can drop you off at home." 

"It's okay," Trina says before you can say anything. You scratch at your thumb. You're not leaving your little sister here alone. Who knows what she and Jason will get up to? You turn your attention back to the movie. 

Denise's mother came and picked her up at nine-forty-five; by ten o'clock you regret not leaving with her. Finding Nemo is on, and Darling is up watching it with everyone. You're still in the chair at an angle to the TV, but it's okay, because everyone's seen this movie a million times, including at school every year after state testing is done for the past 3 years. 

Even Jason begins to look bored, and he's fidgeting around with some battered guitar that he drug out of a closet. He's not any good; he doesn't even know the basics. He's obviously looking for something else to do when he gets up and moves to the window, peering through the blinds. 

"Jimmy, the cops are here!" 

And Jimmy Matson jets out of the house like his pants are on fire and the only way to douse them would be in the thunderstorm outside. Jason bends over double with laughter. It takes Jimmy Matson fifteen minutes to come back, and he's drenched and shaking. 

Without planning it, everybody swears the cops were there and asked for him, but you all told them Jimmy Matson had gone to California weeks ago. He nods and repeats, "That's right, that's right." 

At eleven, Jason and Kevin go to the burger shack that's down the road, even though it's still raining. You want to go, but Trina's being petulant and won't accompany the boys, so you have no choice but to stay at home. Trina asks you why you hadn't gone with them, and you bitch at her that it was because she couldn't get off her rear to even think of going somewhere with her boyfriend. 

"You don't even have any money," Trina says, "so you couldn't have bought anything." 

You're really very testy about the fact that you ought to have been home an hour ago. Eli's gone, nobody but Jason's mom has a car, and you're afraid of her. What if she's high and angry when you ask for a ride? And she's more likely to say no than she is to say yes. Jason lives miles and miles away from your house. Trina tells you to stop worrying so much, but you can't. Being on time is very important to you; your granny will be pissed that you're late, and you don't have a cell phone, so you can't even call her. 

Jason takes pity on you when he and Kevin gets back and goes into the kitchen where there's a phone on the wall. "Hi, Gramma," he says, "whatcha doin'?" 

Jason's grandmother pulls up at around one o'clock, and you and Jimmy Matson and Trina and Jason and Kevin pile into a sports utility vehicle that has one person too many in it. You're worried about getting pulled over, but at least his grandmother is wearing shoes (you checked), and she seems nice and normal and sober. That's more than you could have asked for. 

Granny isn't even mad when you get home. Did she even notice that you two were late? You head into the kitchen to grab something to eat, because you are starving like you smoked a joint by yourself. You make two tuna fish sandwiches and head into the bedroom and shut your door. 

The next day is Easter, and at two in the afternoon Jason calls Trina to bitch about the fact that his stupid crankster mom didn't even get Darling a basket. You're poor as hell, but everybody puts together all the money they have to buy her a basket (you donate two dollars; your granny five; your brother five more). Trina and her best friend Lauren Cox decorate it with Reese's Pieces and Peeps, partially because those are Jason's favorite candies and partially because they're on sale at three-thirty Easter afternoon. 

As you and Trina and Lauren Cox run into Jason's house with a basket between you, your granny yells out to you to tell Darling that you all ran over the Easter bunny, and his last words were as follows: 

"Take this basket to Darling." 

Granny knows more than she let's on; let's be real. 


End file.
